Chris Gatt has made St James Cavalier notable for the variety and novelty of the theatre it presents. One of the opening pro­­duc­­tions for this season was not great theatre but the sort of theatre that cannot fail to grip an audience’s attention.

His take on the account of the Nativity is not irreverent but gently sceptical

Jesus Had Two Daddies by Peter Toscano, who also performs this monologue, is certainly meant to entertain but it really aims to drive home to societies such as ours – where homophobia is not un­known and gays not infrequently run foul of the Church – that gays, lesbians and the like often have a hard time before they come out.

It also delivers the message that, those of them who, like Toscano, believe in religion and need to keep in touch with God should be helped to do so, not scorned for doing it.

Toscano sees himself as a missionary propagating this idea so much so that in the first part of the evening, which is a frankly autobiographical monologue, he wears a dark shirt strongly reminiscent of those worn by Christian clergymen.

He deliberately keeps his narrative light, embellishing it from time to time with episodes from the Bible, mostly the New Testament, with comments that bring out his interpretation of them.

His take on the Nativity account is not irreverent but gently sceptical about such matters as chronology. The main point of what he says about the early life of Jesus is that Joseph seems to disappear early on from the biblical accounts, making it easier for Jesus’ claims to have a heavenly father to be accepted – by readers of the Gospels, by Jesus’ contemporaries and by both groups.

Toscano, though still a believer, is very different from the fervently practising Roman Catholic young man he once was. In the Church he tried his best to purge himself of what he realised were homosexual tendencies. He even got married with the approval of his spiritual director, but the marriage was, of course, a great failure. Just as unsuccessful was his spending money on a private institution that claimed it could cure him of his tendencies.

Toscano’s prayers to God for help, prayers he re-evokes for us touchingly, remained unanswered, but he still would not give up on God. Both God and his homosexuality are hard-wired in him, so he ended up joining the Society of Friends, popularly known as the Quakers, who have no priests, and meet sometimes in absolute silence.

Has this made him a happy man? During the question-and-answer session that followed the play proper (which is less than an hour long) Toscano showed he has now achieved a certain confidence in himself and that his performances in theatre pieces written by himself provide him with a certain satisfaction. Is he afraid of the emotional aspects of the religious life, and is this why he feels safest with the Quakers, a body tolerant of a range of beliefs and even of atheists?

Meetings based on the Bible are common among them, so Toscano, who has a wide knowledge of biblical texts and makes interesting comments on some of them, may be happy attending them, though he never said this on the night I went.

His easy style of communicating with his audience may disguise a very serious person for whom performances of his texts may be an essential method of keeping in touch with himself. Among his accounts of episodes from the New Testament, those of the woman with an issue of blood and that of the raising of Lazarus clearly have a great significance for him.

The woman’s act of coming out of the crowd and touching the hem of Jesus’ garment, causing healing power to issue from him, is an act of courage – she was a social pariah – and, like the issuing of Lazarus from his tomb, become symbols for Tos­ca­no of a gay’s coming out.

Jesus’s instructions for Lazarus’ clothes to be unloosened and for him to be given water are for him symbols of the help gays need to strengthen their resolve when they come out of the closet.

Jesus Had Two Daddies is on the verge of theatre proper, but theatre it is, with its skilful acting of a man’s real, existential problems and its reaching out to other humans.

I am glad I was exposed to it.

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